By Sheldon Spackman

"It's A Start"

Business owners say more can be added to city’s downtown incentive program

Feb 11, 2020 | 4:10 PM

A new incentive program for downtown development projects announced by the City of Red Deer this week is getting mixed reviews from at least two local businesses.

Ken Heywood, owner of Heyrock Chartered Accountant on 47 Street, describes them as mostly a “bricks and mortar thing.”

“The City and the Downtown Business Association (DBA) have promoted those sorts of things a number of times and there’s certainly nothing wrong with them, but I don’t think it’s addressing the issue,” says Heywood. “It’s not the bricks and mortar as much as it’s what’s inside the bricks and mortar that we need to deal with to revitalize our downtown. I think we need a little better focus from governance.”

Heywood says downtown’s reputation and perceived safety issues are obvious challenges to overcome.

“My personal view of that is it’s somewhat overblown,” says Heywood. “The perception is worse actually than reality, but there is certainly a reality there and I think until we address those kinds of issues, the bricks and mortar are nice but it’s not going to solve the problem.

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“I walk the downtown three or four times a week and generally I feel very comfortable downtown – we just have to somehow convince people that it’s not that bad and once people start coming back downtown again, then I think some of the other issues go away.”

Heywood wants to see the City of Red Deer more strictly enforce downtown businesses to adhere to the municipal bylaws, fire codes and safety regulations they’re supposed to be adhering to.

“I think if the City did a better job of monitoring that, that some of what we view as tardy or not particularly nice would suddenly start to disappear,” he explains. “It would force the owners of some of those properties to get on with the job of revitalizing them. That would be an easy one for the City, I mean they send their fire department out to check that stuff on a regular basis, so they just have to make sure that there’s follow-up and that everybody adheres to those.”

Lisa Spencer-Cook, owner of LV’s Vinyl Café on Ross Street, says she’s pleased with the City’s new incentive program for downtown development projects, but adds there’s more that can still be done.

“It appears these are all initiatives aimed at attracting new businesses, which is great, but there’s very little on this list to help us existing businesses,” she suggests. “We’ve been asking for low level street lighting in alley ways, parking meters to be addressed, a stronger police presence, for council themselves to populate and utilize our businesses in order to get a clearer understanding of what can be done while we wait for these initiatives to take place.”

RELATED: DBA lauds City’s downtown development incentives